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In studying Gorky, one is often struck by the homogeneity of the types which he has described. Open any of his books, and you will always meet that "restless" type, dissatisfied with the banality of his existence, trying to get away from it, and leaning irresistibly towards absolute liberty, far removed from social and political obligations. Who are these "restless" people?
Germany's taste in literature, once so natural and healthy, has become morbid, and Sudermann and Gorky and Oscar Wilde, and the rest of the unhealthy crew who swarm about the morgues, the dissecting-rooms, and the houses of assignation of life, the internuntiata libidinum, the leering conciliatrices of the dark streets, are her favorites now.
The absence of all independence, of any passion even a little sincere, the complete submission of heart and mind to the old prescribed morality, the constant effort to realize mere personal ambitions all of these are the reproaches that Gorky addresses to cultivated man, whose moral disintegration he proves has been produced by routine and prejudice.
There were complete sets of Tolstoy, Turgenieff, and Gorky; of Cooper and Mark Twain; of Hugo, and Zola, and Sue; and of Flaubert, De Maupassant, and Paul de Koch. He glanced curiously at the pages of Metchnikoff, Weininger, and Schopenhauer, and wonderingly at those of Ellis, Lydston, Krafft-Ebbing, and Forel.
Let us note, incidentally, the existence of a sort of comic spirit in these works which relieves the tragedy of the situations. In spite of their dark pessimism, the actors in these little dramas have an appearance of gaiety which deceives. It is by this popular humor that Gorky is the continuator of the work of Gogol; this is especially noticeable in "The Fair at Goltva."
He has carried the young along with him, and they have put their ideals in the place which he had left empty. If we now pass on to the first novels and dramas of Gorky, we shall be struck by the fact that, in spite of the talent shown in them, they are very inferior to his short stories. His former mastery is not found, except in his later novels, which we shall take occasion to mention presently.
The interest of the Gorky tale, like the interest of so many other Russian masterpieces, consists in this sharp contact between a simplicity, which we in the West feel to be very old, and a rebelliousness which we in the West feel to be very new.
It has left them, apparently, the clear and childlike power of seeing the cruelty which encompasses them. Gorky is a tramp, a man of the people, and also a critic, and a bitter one. In the West poor men, when they become articulate in literature, are always sentimentalists and nearly always optimists.
He went, saying slowly: "Men are of various kinds . . . as God wills . . . There are worse than me . . . still worse. . . Yes. . . ." Here, in the very act of describing a kind of a fall from humanity, Gorky expresses a sense of the strangeness and essential value of the human being which is far too commonly absent altogether from such complex civilizations as our own.
From the day when he met Korolenko, Gorky's stories appeared mostly in the more important publications. In 1895, he published "Chelkashe" in the important Petersburg review, "Russkoe Bogatsvo;" a year later, other publications equally well known published, "Konovalov," "Malva," and "Anxiety." These works brought Gorky into the literary world, where he soon became one of the favorite writers.
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